This web site provides information on how to use XBRL to help business users exchange business information. Business information incluldes both financial and nonfinancial information. Everything on this site made available to all under a Creative Commons License. Everything may be reused however one sees fit. All we ask is that you give credit where credit is due. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, ideas or other feedback, please contact charles.hoffman@me.com.

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I have updated the documentation for the meta patterns, business use cases, and the document which contains everything together, Modeling Financial Information Using XBRL (DRAFT). These are the same documents which are provide here. Things are more built out, there are more cross references to the sample/example files, etc. Still more to do, but this draft will stand for a while because I need to move on to other things for a bit.

Here is a summary of the business use cases which have been distilled down to the small set of meta patterns. One additional thing which I have done is to break down these business use cases into categories: an accounting use case, a variation of another use case, or an alternative technical approach. This is not perfect yet, but it is making it easier to talk about these use cases.

My next step is to map my meta patterns to the US GAAP Taxonomy and to create examples of SEC XBRL filing pieces for each of the business use cases. That will likely help people see the breaking the pieces of the US GAAP Taxonomy down into meta patterns makes the taxonomy easier to understand and that the meta patterns can be leveraged to help make working with these business use cases easier for business users. This will also help to create a more consistent US GAAP Taxonomy.

BUC14 Reconciliation of Balance. Accounting use case. Reconciliation of one instant to another instant. (This is NOT a roll forward as the reconciling items are instants, not durations, and the balance concepts are different concepts, not the same.)

BUC15 Text Block. Accounting use case. Many Facts modelled as a block of text.